Lent is always an interesting season to me, mostly because some Christians celebrate and others don’t, but those who don’t sometimes think those who do are strange or believe that they are special because they do so. I always need to remind myself exactly what this season is about, so of course I went to my favorite place: dictionary.com and looked up the word. What I always rediscover is that this is a season to mourn — our own sin and what Christ sacrificed for us that we might be reconciled to God. It is a season to set aside something satisfying to remember that Jesus is the only one who can truly fill our desperate craving. Not because that makes us “righteous,” but because he made us righteous. Today, I am meditating on sin, so whether you are a Lent observer or not, I invite you to read Cornelius Plantinga’s summary of sin and see if you find yourself there anywhere.
P.S. For bonus points, what is the origin of the word “Lent”?
Lent[lent]
noun
(in the Christian religion) an annual season of fasting andpenitence in preparation for Easter, beginning on AshWednesday and lasting 40 weekdays to Easter, observed byRoman Catholic, Anglican, and certain other churches.
SIN: “The Bible presents sin by way of major concepts, principally lawlessness and faithlessness, expressed in an array of images: sin is the missing of a target, a wandering from the path, a straying from the fold. Sin is a hard heart and a stiff neck. Sin is blindness and deafness. It is both the overstepping of a line and the failure to reach it – both transgression and shortcoming. Sin is a beast crouching at the door. In sin, people attack or evade or neglect their divine calling. These and other images suggest deviance: even when it is familiar, sin is never normal. Sin is disruption of created harmony and then resistance to divine restoration of that harmony. Above all, sin disrupts and resists the vital human relation to God, and it does all this disrupting and resisting in a number of intertwined ways. Sinful life, as Geoffrey Bromiley observes, is a partly depressing, partly ludicrous caricature of genuine human life.”
Cornelius Plantinga, “Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be”
